Earth, 21st Century
LIGHTS "It struck all at once- felt like reality was turning upside down. People's phones blew up in their hands, the utility poles burst into flames, cars were going off everywhere, at night light-bulbs glowed without being on... I remember how many people died that first day- it was because of the implants. That's what happened to my mother. The shock had short-circuited her pacemaker, '' ''somethin' like that.. her body couldn't handle it. The dependent people usually passed first like that. So many of us were burying family that night..." The first reports came from Lisbon. An entourage of lights, 3 or 4 in number, organized in patterns and hovering just above the central city- the all too common phenomenon of sky-lights. In 10 minutes, the same phenomenon was spotted in Madrid. In another 5 New York and Toronto- then Paris and London, Tokyo, Shenzhen, Canberra... an ever-expanding list of sightings from every city dotting the planet. The sightings expanded from a few dozen to thousands within a half-hour, almost calculated in its growth. Across the world people stepped out to witness this magnificent spectacle unfold, whether in the dead of night or midday. Almost every witness stood with their cameras and televisions switched to the news channels -images and videos circulating the internet across every corner of the globe. But alas, this worldwide congregation did not last. The first pulses began 10:35 UTC. Emanating across the entire surface, anything that was connected to a power grid combusted or shut down within the first minute. Transformers and utility poles burst into flames, electrical effigies of fire- throughout the dark side of Earth, the only lights that shone came from the spreading flames. Anything electronic was rendered useless. The highways were backed with dysfunctioning cars and accidents across their entire length. People's bodies and minds left mangled from implants going awry to induction- aneurysms and seizures accompanying the burn victims, the organ failure and mutilated insides. Hospitals stacked with the injured and dying. Their patients who were on life support the same time as the pulses were already gone. Almost all of their electrical infrastructure collapsed, they wrote their casualty logs by hand- stacked beginning to end in names and death times. It didn't take long before they reserved the equipment left for salvageable cases. The worst were left to pass. Many areas did not ever come into contact with their national government after that point. If their local government survived, they lived under harsh ephemeral regimes on the brink of collapse where the few specks of civilization that remained were brutalized and destitute- outside, savagery reigned in its purest form. The pulses continued for several days afterward. All electricity was smothered to death. Civilization would not recover for several decades. MUSHROOM CLOUDS "On that day we'd spent the night hiding...people looted in the streets, shootouts were every night... our hiding was interrupted when we heard a deafening explosion in the distance. When I looked out my window all I saw was white, my eyes felt like they'd melted-and then the blastwave knocked me out... ...I don't think anyone ever came to help. The whole place was flattened. Occasionally a survivor or two would pass by, burnt everywhere, no hair on their bodies. Sometimes they fell and died before they hit the ground." -Bailey Adams The days following were marked by gargantuan explosions, gamma radiation and black rain. Many had received the sudden pulses as a foreign attack. The isolated missile crews that managed to preserve or regain contact with their command were ordered to exhaust their entire flights. Retaliatory bombings landed everywhere they could. From orbit, the skies winked with lights hundreds of miles in diameter, everything underneath them blasted down to the tiniest molecule. When the death throes of the world finally passed all that was left was a nuclear winter. The sun shrouded out, hardly an obscure ball of light struggling through the mile-dense ash clouds. Fires raged for miles on end. Cities were toppled and the few unlucky survivors left amidst the rubble were left to rot. The strongest were taken by their local governments to help rebuild- the weakest left to die, one less mouth to feed. Bodies lined the streets and were buried underneath every rubble pile toppled in the shockwave. Cities became graveyards. September 16, 2052 - once upon this very night the last light of mankind vanished. In a sudden flash of a few seconds, every single national grid on the planet had imploded with electromagnetism; the global electrical grid irreversibly shattered. For three years onward the survivors left dwelled in the darkness, groveling underneath coal mines and oil drills, most of their governments collapsing or regressing in the time since. Every intricate global system devised by their greatest minds had collapsed in an instant. Their dreams of a utopian future were dashed in a single second. Humanity was not able to be saved from itself. Starting from that year onward, one can dig down to the geological stratum and find themselves surrounded by thousands of graveyards; each filled with millions of corpses apiece. The longest night had begun. THE PRIME DIRECTIVE No more than a year after the collapse, a tiny pale dot appeared in the sky: a pale grey dot, a fraction the size of the moon's face in the sky, quivering silent and lonely across the polar orbit of Earth. It was sudden and at times dissappeared for days on end; just before the onlookers thought it was gone forever, returning and assuming the exact same orbit it stayed in last time. After months of remaining suspended in the sky, high up in Earth's gravitational pull, many took it as a symbol of the collapse; possibly the eye of God, an avatar of satan or some other supernatural being; a harbinger of death waiting to finish us off, or simply watching our last raspy breaths. Superstition and legends spread among the commoners on the ground. The last scientists in their hiding took it upon themselves to look further. The last telescopes remaining pointed their lenses to the minute ball in both light and day; and became witness to a sight most grotesque and mind-boggling. It appeared to be made of metal, a giant rotund sphere of hard steel, its surface was marked by giant rigid towers ending in huge domes with lenses on each side like magnificent telescopes contrasted by silos reaching deep within the sphere's depths. Giant flat outcroppings akin to sails portruded from every surface, and on each side of the massive ball were engines a quarter of the ball's size- the sphere itself was estimated to be 50 miles in diameter. Most strangely its surface was in a constant state of change, with new silos being covered over and rebuilt in different areas, huge slits forming and closing like sutures and new different kinds of machinery being constructed across its face. Under a telescope lens the smooth surface of the ball looked like static, millions of tainy grains constantly shifting over the background, and the background itself shifting and waving with it. Where a dense cloud of grains formed a new structure had shown when they parted. It was utterly staggering to the scientists witnessing it. They made of it what they could- an extraterrestrial malleable ball of steel, possibly nanotechnology, awaiting in space. But for now all they could do was wait. The few aware of this horrifying prospect could only wait. Then sometime in 2055, as observatory records state, the ball made its first contact with Earth- on one night from its many slits and silos thousands of tiny particles outpoured, sprinkling into the planet's sky and flying across the world like tiny meteorite showers across lighting up the entire night sky. These tiny mechanical motes, each a remote-controlled robotic drone, began to send messages to leaders of the world: it announced itself as the Archailect, an artificial being made by a race many light-years away from here, and it had seen what happened to humanity. "It said, 'you can't do this alone. You won't get anywhere by yourselves; but with me, you'll live in a world far beyond your wildest dreams. You'll be accelerated to paradise.' Of course, we were all desperate enough to believe it. So we all signed on." The whole world over new alliances were being forged between nations and this Archailect. It announced this string of new alliances the "Global Prosperity Initiative": a global effort, overseen by the benevolent alien computer, to uplift humanity to a higher state of existence. Humanity would be cared for in a new friendly regime that vowed prosperity for all. The few countries that declined its offer collapsed soon after, whereupon the Archailect asserted itself out of a necessity to maintain order and peace for the scattered remainders. Other times outright subjugation was used on the most belligerent nations; all in the name of human fortune. The very few countries that were able to locked themselves in war with the Archailect's nations for years. But for now, reconstruction began. Much of the world's reconstruction was contributed to by the Archailect's nanomachines. Highways being cleared of dead cars, buildings and their rubble being cleaned up, and most of all the electrical grid was being rebuilt. Large-scale, industrial reconstruction ignited itself across the whole world. Now with the helping hand of an alien Humanity was rising itself out from the mud like it did as slouching apes millions of years ago, and this time they were going farther than ever. In cruel irony the stars of the Milky Way that humanity's eyes wondered in awe for started to dissipate from their skies, and soon it was nothing but a black canvas of space from the light pollution; like a wall of nothingness above all their heads. The satellites used to hold this fragile alliance of fragile societies flew again. Most of all the brave new world flew their banners underneath one great banner: the Global Prosperity Initiative. The entire species owed its life to this great alliance. Within the confines of the many political bureaus making up the G-P-I, many remained wary. The cosmic traveler's true intentions were still left up to scrutiny to the skeptical few. Why did it seek to help our microcosmic decrepit race? What possible gain could it get? Some even accused it of being the perpetrator of the apocalypse three years ago. For these skeptics within the already-allianced countries, their concerns were scoffed off by the majority. Most would rather take their chances over going back to living like beasts in a harsh world. Even if it were malevolent, they'd still choose nothing and continue on with life. This soul-binding choice was already made, and there was no going back. "...At 18:56, ex-general of the army Orlando Day announced his intentions to revolt against the alliance between Mrs. President and the intelligence dubbed the Archailect- at 20:34, the last coup member's body was identified. Orlando Day, twelve members of the reserve federal cabinet, and each soldier of the 1,000-strong coup were all reported killed or missing, presumed dead... 97% of casualties inflicted by Archailect sub-units. Damaged infrastructure was repaired 100 percent by sub-units in two days." RECONSTRUCTION ERA Under the guidance of the Archailect, the world began rebuilding. Within months entire megalopoli were reconstucted from the ground up, their roads cleared of dead cars, debris, power grids being re-made from scratch and new satellites being assembled and launched to wind this interconnected new era together. Factories and data banks went back online; now the governments, with access to 100% of the Earth's resources, were able to provide material for themselves unlike ever before. The 'constitution treaty' of this new alliance declared every citizen within its borders had guaranteed rights to healthcare, housing, education, and security.... the last clause used to facilitate the construction of a world-wide indepth surveillance system that kept every citizen on record at all times. The borders of the Global Union were stated to be every country that had agreed to join or was 'conglomerated' under the Archailect's wisdom; the only border was the stratosphere. In this age under a provisional government, AGE OF PROSPERITY Every citizen was guaranteed the right to healthcare, housing, and education... and along with these unspoken perks of government, came an unspoken, unseen system used to monitor and track every recorded subject under this new 'golden age'- those dissidents who doubted the true goodness of the G-P-I never being seen again. Now it is 2063. Eleven years have passed since the Sky Intelligence came and helped pull humanity out from the dirt and into the new age. The megaopoli span larger than ever before, their streets bustling with people and cars and all kinds of inhabitations- the scars of the collapse hardly a scratch on these giant urban areas, and the inhabitants embracing their newfound civilization to ward off the memories of the collapse. Each and every human lies underneath the glorious banner of the Global Prosperity Initiative, itself under the benevolent leadership of the Archailect, observing the earth as its seas and temperature rise. Still yet on every corner, in their houses, their laptops, phones and clothing they are tracked and monitored for the purpose of securing the new establishment from detractors wishing to undermine humanity; like the ones in the northwest, already breaching from the tendrils of government. The skeptics disappear and are not spoken of. The Prosperity Age is at its peak.